


Everything and Nothing

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [5]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Dollhouse - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Torture, dub-con seduction for escape purposes, not actually RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:12:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6228775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: "any, any, Survival rules: three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without hope." John Sheppard is captured and held for over three months. It takes all of him to get home to Atlantis. Set in SGA Season 5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything and Nothing

The rules of survival were poetically symmetrical: three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without hope. There was wiggle room in there. John had gone through training with a Japanese-American woman who had trained as a pearl diver and could hold her breath for ten minutes. Three hours without shelter only meant in certain extreme weather conditions. On the Atlantis Expedition, however, he didn't have three months to hope. Expedition policy was simple: after six weeks of no contact, an individual was listed as either KIA or MIA, depending on the circumstances surrounding his disappearance.

John had been through pretty intense SERE training (at least, he thought he had - he might have gone through just the basics like everyone else and then had the intense kind programmed into him), so he held out for six weeks. Six weeks of beatings, sleep deprivation, food and water deprivation, sensory deprivation. They were trying to disorient him, but they hadn't counted on one of his personalities having an absolute sense of time and keeping track for him, reassuring him that he hadn't been deprived of food or water for critically dangerous amounts of time ever. They wanted to keep him alive. He was useful to them. For what, he hadn't figured out (but the hostage negotiator had: information on Atlantis, as always; they wanted to sneak into Atlantis and go to Earth, where they thought it was endlessly prosperous).

When the six-week mark passed, John refused to panic, because he remembered how long they'd looked for Ford. They'd officially stopped at six weeks, but any time they'd found a sign of him, they'd check it out, and John had done his best to leave signs. Code words that his captors could try at a particular tavern on a planet where Teyla liked to trade, code words that were based purely in Earth culture that he prayed his team would recognize. The Simpsons, Johnny Cash, War and Peace. Allusions that were specific to him.

John held out for three months. Three months was about the longest anyone from the SGC had been held or missing. O'Neill had done a hundred days on an alien planet, right? And his team had gone back for him. And that was even during the height of the war with the Goa'uld. John didn't flatter himself that he was as valuable as O'Neill, except he held something of a similar position for Atlantis as team leader of the flagship team (and, okay, also as military commander of the entire expedition and 2IC of any civilian commander).

But they were catching on. His code words weren't working. Atlantis wasn't interested in trading with anyone who didn't have anything useful or helpful in return (which should have been obvious, but these guys, while determined, weren't the brightest - only bright enough to keep John locked up and under heavy guard). They were getting angry. And when they got angry, they got creative.

John couldn't crack. He wouldn't. He had to get back to Atlantis. Once he was back, in the chair, with her in his head, everything would be all right. He had to hold on.

He had to turn off the personality who kept absolute time, because his captors were pushing the limit with food and water every time. They were smart enough to figure out precisely how little they could give him and still keep him alive enough to torture and interrogate. They did everything imaginable to him. Everything.

And nothing, because John had a plan. It was an awful one. He knew they would alternate the intensity of their interrogation tactics. Starting easy and getting worse and worse was pointless, because his pain tolerance would build with it. No, they'd alternate here and there, a light day, a nightmare day, keep it unpredictable (and yet it was predictable; John figured it out himself with his own math skills - Joe's math skills, actually). So he sacrificed his personalities, one by one, lined them up to take each torture session, the weaker ones on the easy days, the tougher ones on the harder days, the nightmare days. It was ruthless and cruel - each and every one of them was a person, a whole different person, and he was letting them be tortured, but each of them was also him, and he had to protect himself, had to protect John Sheppard, because Atlantis needed John Sheppard.

His captors were convinced he'd cracked, when the man under their knives and electrodes and hands would sob and whimper, insist he was someone else, that he didn't know what they wanted with him. Sometimes he would promise exorbitant ransom fees. Other days he would tell them he was worthless, no one was coming for him, they might as well kill him. On the worst days he would scream at them, bait them, insult them, promise them vengeance from an array of Earth-based military and intelligence forces, none of whom were Atlantis.

In the end it was Joe who got them (him) out. Joe, the painfully shy math major who'd been awed when the popular John Sheppard took him under his wing, showed him how to party, showed him how the kids with money lived. Joe, who would make flickering appearances on the light days (and light was such a terribly relative term), the slightest dip of his chin, coquettish glance from beneath lashes, wetting his lips, hints and promises right before the torture started in. It was Joe who followed through with filthy kisses and roaming hands and an orgasm laced with pain, and while his captor was coming down from the high, sinking into the afterglow, it was Joe and not John who strangled him.

It was the architect with the photographic memory who helped him find his way out of the facility, and it was the granola-munching hippie English teacher who got him through the hike to the gate. It was John who got them all home, John whose IDC had been rendered useless after six weeks, who had to fast-talk his way through to Woolsey and get them to lower the shield because his kidnappers would be coming at any moment. Woolsey hesitated, and John begged them to send for Ceccoli, because they'd been in Afghanistan together, and he knew things about John that no one else knew.

"Sir, this is Sergeant Ceccoli," he said, voice trembling and hesitant.

John said, "Victor, this is Foxtrot."

And Ceccoli said, "It's him. Let him through."


End file.
